Mason hurries just a little. He knows Wayah doesn’t care when he gets there. She’ll have everything packed up and ready for him, but he likes to hang out with her a bit. He likes to linger. He clutches his gift for her— some smoked hams from his farm and a crazy old tool he found at an antique store. He turns up Roseboro Road, heads toward the Blue Ridge Parkway, his windows rolled down and the radio low. It’s a muggy morning, Mason has to make his own breeze.
Wayah is an old woman who lives in a long, low house, bermed into the side of a mountain. The only way to get to her is on foot, and you have to know the way. She lives on her own in the woods, on land that is recognized by most as the property of the National Park Service, in the Cherokee National Forest. Everyone in Hemlock knows she’s there, and everyone in Hemlock, for the most part, leaves her alone. She has told Mason of a few run-ins with tourist kids, but she doesn’t seem too broken up about it. But then again, Mason hasn’t seen Missus Wayah upset herself over anything.
He has been coming out to Wayah’s for about six years now, initially at Katie’s request. Wayah grows, forages, and prepares herbal medicines for clients at Katie’s bodywork and yoga studio. Mason had been commissioned to place orders and pick them up since back when he and Katie were a couple. Very nearly engaged, the thought of it now causing him to whistle a low note of relief.
Over that time, Mason has come to love his visits with Wayah. Her soft, murmuring voice and her steadiness seem more authentic to him than anything he’s ever encountered. Wayah’s just Wayah. Untarnished by the world, or so it seems.
He comes up to her shack whistling, just so she knows that someone is coming, and that that someone is him. She’s already sitting outside, smoking a pipe she’d made herself, and sitting on a little stool (maybe she’d made that, too) by the crooked door. She smiles at him, revealing tiny, worn teeth. He stoops low and hugs her, breathes her smell of tobacco and incense. Despite the weather she always seems to be wearing a thousand layers of clothes, her thin gray hair ever neatly pinned.
“Hey lady,” Mason says as she holds on to his neck.
“Watchu bring me?” She says, happy, gesturing her pipe at the hams on a string, looped around Mason’s thumb.
“Just a little meat.”
“Sgi[1], boy. In the house?”
“I’ll take ‘em in there, Wayah. I want to show you something.”
She waits. Puffing.
He produces the little device from the antique store and holds it out in his palm. It is a press, rectangular and lightweight, made of hard rubber. The top plate has ten even rows of five round holes, about the size of a nail head. And the bottom plate has half-inch stubs that push through the holes in the top plate, to stamp out little tablets. It’s a medicine-making machine from the past, though Mason cannot discern when.
Wayah puts her pipe into the folds of her skirt and takes the device from him.
“It’s for making pills,” he says.
She runs her nimble fingers around the chamfered corners, and over the perforating stubs.
“How does it work?” Mason asks.
Wayah stands up slowly and moves inside the house, toward the long table where she keeps pretty much everything. Wayah sits down and puts on an old pair of glasses taped together at the center, turns her attention to a large mortar and pestle, filled with a small amount of white powder. She adds a bit of water to the powder and begins to mix it rhythmically.
“What is it?” Mason asks.
“Kuzu root,” Wayah says. “For drunks.”
She adds a dash more water and a thick paste forms. She picks up the plate with the holes in it and fills all the holes with the paste, taking so long doing this that Mason begins to think he might fall asleep. As if knowing, she says,
“Get coffee,” and gesticulates toward the “kitchen” area, which is a series of basins and an old propane camping stove. Mason wonders where she gets gas canisters. In a old percolator on the stove, he finds the coffee. When he gets back to her table, she’s waiting for him. The holes on the top plate of the tablet maker are full, and Wayah eases it down over the perforating plate. The stubby pins shove up through the holes, producing tidy tablets of the paste at the top of the pins. Wayah smiles.
“That’s it?” Mason says.
“Let it dry, yes.” Wayah says. “Thank you. I like it.” She beams up at him.
“Well, good,” Mason says. “Good. That makes my day, friend.”
—
[1] The English spelling of a Cherokee word for thank you